Lol my old boss hated remote work because he had to spend time with his family.
“I gotta get to the office mates!”
Best thing about working from home is stepping away from my desk, popping upstairs, and tossing my little baby boy up in the air a few times while he giggles and smiles.
childless men miss sense of community
Myself and everyone I know works remote. We’re all childless/childfree and not a single one of us miss any community, we all feel there are zero downsides to it. This just comes across like propaganda to stop people working remote and return to office.
I work remote (Going on 9 years now) and I miss a sense of community. Do I want to stop working remotely? Hell no, screw that. But two things can be true the same time, I can enjoy and encourage them at work, dnd I can also miss a sense of community.
I think it’s okay to hold this opinion because it’s individual to everyone.
This just comes across as propaganda
Being dismissive and pulling the rhetoric that this is propaganda is toxic as fuck.
The truth often is somewhere in the middle
I agree that forcing return to office is either stupid or harmful. But I do like the people I work with, and not seeing them anymore would be saddening
The solution is obvious though, simply allow choice
Yeah, every sense of community I’ve ever felt with a job was also ruined by that same job. I don’t remotely miss it, and I’m firmly child-free.
I’m single and childless and I personally like being hybrid. Full work from home fucks my mental health up pretty bad. I’m definitely in the minority among my peers though. I also wouldn’t ever ask that anyone else be forced to come back to the office just because it isn’t for me.
I go in office when I want to, a few hours a day or a few times a week for a couple hours. But full work from home had me talking to myself… way too much.
I would love to work remote, but the nature of my job kinda conflicts with that (field service engineer).
That said, I actually like my coworkers quite a lot (there’s only 4 of us). This is the first place I’ve worked where I genuinely feel like we all care about each other’s well-being. I was in the hospital for a few days back in March and they texted periodically just to check how I was doing. Wishing each other happy father’s day/birthday/anniversary/etc, congratulating baby births, invited to kids’ birthday parties, and other things of that nature. Not just surface-level stuff, either. I would hang out with these guys.
The ability to work from home has given me innumerable benefits, but I must admit that as a very introverted guy who’s been going through some shit, and who’s go-to move during times of anxiety and depression is to distance themselves from everyone… yeah, sometimes I do miss my coworkers. A lot of them are pretty great people. Doesn’t mean I’d rather spend 3 hours a day sitting in traffic to see them, just means I low-key miss someone to bitch with.
In theory, we have the Third Space for that kind of socializing. Parks, plazas, union halls, club spaces and dance halls, churches, community centers, libraries…
In practice, they’ve been gradually privatized and monetized until everything is The Mall. If you don’t have $10 to spend for the hour, there’s nowhere you can legally so much as sit down. Hard to socialize on these terms.
My city decided to take its $7B budget and close a $330M shortfall by gutting parks, libraries, and other public amenities. Meanwhile, the police and fire departments are seeing a budget surge of over $100M.
It’s something I’ve noticed in general.
I had an amazing boss who was single and lived alone, and really love her staff. We had unecessarily long staff meetings every week. When I started I was annoyed by them until someone pointed out that the time we spent with everyone getting distracted and going off-topic and padding out the meeting while we ate our lunch around the conference room table was, for her, the weekly family meal.
I still don’t like unnecessary meetings, but it gave me a different perspective on why some people like them.
I work in a bar, and I love seeing most of my coworkers. I obviously can’t speak on the WFH aspect, as it’d be impossible for me, but enjoying the company of the people you work with isn’t a foreign concept, especially in the service industry
I actually don’t like my coworkers very much I definitely wouldn’t hang out with them so not having to be near them all day is a benefit.
It’s not even that they are bad people, it’s just that they are people who I wouldn’t choose to hang out with.
Itt: cognitive disonannce.
The study isn’t bs. Lemmy users just won’t accept that they don’t even come close to representing the average individual.
Or if we use less adversarial language, this study is far from universal and its findings should be applied with the understanding that not all people will not match those who were in the study. As with most things, far more research is needed to get a thorough understanding.
41 year old male, no kids, no wife or girlfriend, been work from home for 5 years now. I’ve never been happier and more productive.
I get my sense of community from my friends not my coworkers. This study is B.S.
I’ll concur - same stats as you too.
Just because you have anecdotal evidence of the contrary doesn’t mean it can’t be true, quantitatively. I, too, am a childless man - although I do have a wife - and don’t resonate with this, but that doesn’t mean I’ll just cast aside the findings. Many, especially young, men are unhappy in their everyday, partly due to a lack of sense od community in the “modern” world.
Yeah, you gotta have friends that are close by and you can get out with or they can come over. If you don’t… Sometimes it feels lonely. But to be honest, you kinda get used to it.
You know there are always outliers because research often looks at populations in general and not the exact experience of a specific person. Unless it’s a case study but that’s different.
Either way that’s a really good thing for you, the modern world makes it difficult to make and keep close to friends.
True, and I was drawing on anecdotal evidence that I didn’t elaborate on in my original comment. While I know there are people who do not do well or enjoy work from home, I have yet to meet those people, all my coworkers and friend group are loving work from home.
So a more accurate statement would have been, based on my personal experience along with with coworkers and my friend circle this study is B.S.
Tbf there’s definitely some confirmation bias in there because a person who didn’t enjoy being remote probably wouldn’t seek that type of job
Being childfree is its own reward.
Why can’t your workers be your workers, your family be your family, your friends be your friends?
I’ve been working from home with my older family members since COVID started and I’ve been pretty happy since it’s always been my goal. I’ve also had a knee injury for the past 3 weeks, and it’s potentially prevented me from making it worse, and allowed me to continue working. I’ve almost been working remotely for the majority of my career, which is kind of cool to think about. I like working from home, but I understand not everyone likes it.
Honestly, I’d probably sooner retire from tech and work something else if I was forced to go back into an office with no possibility of getting a remote job.
For me WFH has helped me have a community. The office was never a real community, and the fact that we all worked together got in the way of being actual friends. Instead with the added time from WFH I was able to prioritize my social life and go to more events and meet people I actually have stuff in common with. Additionally my in-office job forced me to live in a dead suburb, WFH allowed me to move to a city with a lot more social opportunities.
Of course probably not everyone prioritized that. The office might be good for some people, but for people like me who don’t necessarily socialize at the office very easily WFH is much better for community.
No we don’t. Work is work, not fucking community.
I like my coworkers. They’re cool. I just went to acro yoga with one, and go bouldering with another. We show up, talk shit, and get the job done - sometimes it’s a good time. Sometimes we get our asses kicked. But that builds camradrie, too.
I will say, this is blue collar stuff. When I worked as a software dev, I definitely didn’t care about spending much time with my coworkers.
I guess it’s a poor choice of words but there’s definite value in workplace camaraderie. Don’t let your jadedness fuel the bosses’ union busting.
Unions haven’t got anything to do with it. Unions are about protecting you from unfair business practises, it’s not a social club, nor do they try to be.
No union without social interaction to found and preserve it. It’s why small businesses are much worse at ganging up on big businesses that exploit them than workers are at ganging up on bosses: Businesses aren’t people, they don’t have social interactions. Workers are and do, thus unions can and do form.
Unions aren’t community.
They’re a necessary defence mechanism against capitalism.
Humour is a defence mechanism. Altruism is a defence mechanism. And with those two, camaraderie is a given.
Also it would be a sorry state of affairs if workers under capitalism had their defence mechanisms, but not canalisation workers shovelling literal shit.
Yes I do, speak for yourself.
Well, just from reading that I can assure you your coworkers don’t.
